she replied, wiping off the look of disgust and replacing it with a bland, easy smile I recognised from the poor little rich girls I’d just interviewed.
‘I am too tired today.’ I prayed she would make it quick. ‘Can you just punch me in the face and leave?’
Cici looked at me blankly for a moment and then threw her head back in a terrifying laugh that I’d previously only seen written down in Jenny’s most manic text messages. ‘Oh, hahahahahaha. That’s funny.’
‘Is it?’
Just for a moment, I really wished I’d had a panic button installed under my desk.
‘Yes?’
I breathed in, breathed out and waited but apparently she really didn’t know what I was talking about. Cici sounded the same but, while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, something was very slightly off. Her super-trendy outfits had been replaced by a pair of bootcut jeans and a regular-looking sweatshirt and her hair, gorgeous as it was, didn’t look like it had seen a straightening iron in, well, at least five seconds. Maybe she was dying? I peered under the table. She was wearing trainers. No heels. Perfect for a speedy getaway.
‘Oh.’ Finally, she clicked. ‘Because you think I hate you and, you know, all that stuff that happened.’
When Cici said ‘all that stuff that happened’ I assumed what she meant was the time she’d had my suitcase blown up at the airport in Paris and tried to sabotage my career by blackmailing my assistant into screwing me over. Or maybe when she got me fired, which meant I almost lost my visa and could have been deported. Or maybe it was the time she tried to destroy Gloss, the magazine her very own sister was working on, before it had even launched. Of course, I had responded to this evildoing with grace and maturity and had risen above the whole thing. Aside from the time Louisa almost beat the living shit out of her. But that was totally by the by.
‘If you’re not here to ruin my life, or at the very least Christmas, what do you want?’ I asked. I was too weak to get into a scrap again, although throwing up on her would be new and, I imagined, quite effective.
‘So, Deedee told me you need a new assistant.’ She flicked her hands out to the side in a kind of jazz hands gesture. Her nails were all chipped and bitten down. Cici Spencer hadn’t had a manicure … OK, she was definitely dying. ‘So, like, I’m here to be your new assistant.’
More often than not, in situations where most people would have been rendered speechless it was my unfortunate habit to let out a string of expletives and unintelligible noises. However, in this instance, I was quite simply gobsmacked.
‘I know we’ve had some issues in the past,’ Cici went on, ignoring the horror on my face and the fear in my eyes. ‘But I’ve totally changed. I’ve been in India at a yoga retreat.’
As if to convince me that this complete and utter spiritual shift was complete, she tugged on a tiny plait, interwoven with gold and red threads, hidden in her hair.
‘I was there for six weeks.’
For a moment, I was very worried that I had actually drunk myself to death the night before and this was some sort of purgatorial test but a quick and painful pinch of the arm proved that whether I liked it or not, this was happening.
‘So, you went to a spa in India, got your hair done and now you’re a new person?’ I just wanted to get all my facts straight before I called the police.
‘I mean, they called it a spa,’ Cici said with a raised eyebrow. ‘But, you know, I didn’t dare sit in the steam room on my own and I had to take my own towels. And for some reason there were, like, cows and elephants everywhere.’
‘Because you were in India?’ I suggested.
‘Yeah, at a spa,’ she repeated.
‘Right.’ I used my last reserve of strength to stand up and press my hands onto the desk, trying my hardest to look stern and as though I wouldn’t fall over if a kitten pushed me with a whisker. ‘This has been fascinating but you have to leave. I’m sure you’ve got whatever hilarious kick you were after out of my outfit anyway.’
‘Listen, Angela.’ Cici flushed bright red and stood up until we were face to face. Except for now she was about five inches taller than me, even in trainers. Albeit nice ones. ‘I really have changed and I really want to make a new start. I guess in some weird, abstract way, I sort of kind of feel like you and I owe each other an apology.’
‘That is interesting,’ I said as my psycho alarm began to blare inside my head.
‘But clearly you want to hold a grudge.’ She sniffed and feigned a sad face. ‘I guess spending all that time soul-searching and working out how I can be a better person, how I can make my pops and my sister proud, I guess all that was for nothing.’
‘It would seem so,’ I said with as much sympathy as I could muster. ‘I hope you at least got a good massage out of it.’
‘You’ve changed.’ Her eyes flashed, as though she was being hard done by, as though she might actually be able to squeeze out a tear. ‘I know you don’t believe it but I liked working with Mary when I was her assistant, you can ask her.’
‘Well, yeah,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m fairly certain you never accidentally on purpose dropped a picture of a huge penis in any of her PowerPoint presentations either, did you?’
‘You have changed, Angela,’ she nodded, smiling. ‘What, now you’re a big shot editor with your dumb dip-dye colour job, you’re too big and important to give a girl a second chance? And FYI, I wasn’t even going to mention your cruddy outfit.’
‘By my count, this would be your fifth chance,’ I pointed out. ‘And it’s not dip-dye, I just haven’t had time to get the roots done.’
‘Whatever,’ she snapped. ‘Namaste.’
I watched Cici and her wounded karma flounce all the way down the office, confusing the newbies who thought she was Delia in a never-before-seen huff and scaring those who remembered her from her previous reign of terror at Spencer Media. I fixed my eyes on her tiny bottom until she was safely in the lift and safely out of the building. And then I sat down. And then I sighed. And then I threw up in my bin.
My name is Angela. I am disgusting.
Two hours later, I was still sat at my desk, surrounded by Christmas cheer I was struggling to feel and desperate to get outside into the fresh air. But sadly, if I wanted to take any time off the following week, there was a lot of work to be done. I’d already had an email from Mary saying they needed me in on Monday but I was still hoping to take the rest of the week off. Four days of fun was better than none.
I rubbed my eyes to stop them from blurring as I stared at a page of mascara reviews, only to pull away my fists covered in blackish brown smudges. I’d been looking at my computer for too long and I was a long way from being finished yet. There was every chance I shouldn’t have spent half an hour streaming the Come Dine With Me Christmas special after Cici left but how else was I supposed to get back my seasonal spirit? That girl brought out my inner Grinch. Before I could focus my eyes back on the screen, my iPhone rattled across the glass top of my desk, flashing up a name that made me very, very happy.
‘Hello!’ I screeched,
